Question Four. Whether two Angels can be in the Same Place at Once

273. Eighth I ask whether two angels can be in the same place at once.

274. That they cannot be:

Because [Aquinas] two total causes cannot be together in respect of the same effect; but an angel, when existing in a place, is a total cause with respect to an operation in such place that he is said to be there by; so another angel, cannot, because of another operation exercised there, be there along with him.

275. Another reason is given by others: that things that have the same mode of existing ‘in’ cannot be together. The point is made clear about two glorious bodies, which cannot naturally be together in the same place, although a glorious body could be together with a non-glorious body. So about two Gods: if they were equal, neither could be with the other (according to Damascene ch.5), and yet God can be together with a creature because of their different way of being in a place. Since therefore angels have the same way of being in a place, they cannot be together in the same place.

II. To the Question

276. In this question the truth is not as certain and clear as it is in the preceding one [n.262], because Richard of Saint Victor On the Trinity 4.25 seems to prove that demons do not have bodies by the fact that a legion of them was in the body of one possessed man (Mark 5.1-17); but a legion could not have been in someone if they had bodies. Therefore he seems to prove that, if they had bodies with them, their bodies would have been in the same place together; therefore now, when they do not have bodies, it seems one should say that they were together without bodies.

277. Also if one angel, who is moving the heaven, is in the south and another good angel, sent by God from heaven to earth, has to pass through that place, there seems no necessity for him not to pass through in a straight line, as it were, or for the other to yield to him.

278. Also, if all the angels had been created before the corporeal creation (as seems true according to Damascene ch.17 [n.215]), it does not seem easy to assign any way that they were then together - and if they were then not together, then not together now either.

279. Whatever be true of their natural power as to fact and possibility, yet as to possibility in respect of divine power there seems no impossibility in angels’ being able by that power to be together.

II. To the Principal Arguments

280. And so one must reply to the arguments, when they seem to prove the opposite.

To the first [n.274] I say that it presupposes something false, namely that an angel is in a place only by operation - which was rejected in the first question on this topic [nn.204-215]. Also, if that supposition be admitted, one angel could operate about the place with one operation and the other with another operation, and each could, in their view [sc. those holding this opinion], be put by its operation in the place where he was operating (namely the place of the one body) and thus both could be together, which is the opposite of the conclusion of the argument.

281. And if you say that they could not operate without moving bodily - neither does this help, because just as an angel moves freely, so he can move according to the utmost, or below the utmost, of his power; and if he moves something below the utmost of his power, another angel could move the movable thing along with him (as is clear about a man, who while able, according to the utmost of his power, to carry ten stones, can, below the utmost of his power, carry five, so that his active power has an act only about five stones - and then he could have another man, cooperating with him, carrying the same), for an angel is a substance that acts freely.

282. To the second [n.275] I say that the major [sc. ‘things that have the same mode of existing ‘in’ cannot be together’], which is famous in many topics, is not reasonable. For ‘to exist in’ states no essential relation to that in which it is, but ‘to exist by (or from)’ does state an essential relation to that by which it is. What is the reasonableness, then, in saying that several things can be by the same and be so in the same way and that several things cannot be in the same and be so in the same way of being in? For why is an accidental respect more repugnant to the species of one idea than the dependence of an essential respect? Likewise, temporal things have the same respect to time as things in place have to place; so it hereby seems to follow that several temporal things cannot be in the same time, which is absurd.

283. Now as to what is said about two glorious bodies, and about two Gods, if they were together [n.275] - if this is true, it must be proved otherwise than by the term ‘being in a place in the same way of being in’, for no repugnance seems to arise from this for things that are together.